The barren streets and hollow buildings of this militarized non-place were designed for use as an immersive staging ground for police-training exercises, fighting staged riots, burglaries, bank robberies, and other crimes.

According to AIS, their consultant-designers kitted out the site’s “live-fire ranges with internal ballistic and anti-ricochet finishes, simulation and targetry equipment, and range sound systems,” a complete multimedia package that would soon also include HD video projectors and even “laser-based 3D virtual training environments.”

For Clarke, the “facsimile” urbanism of this site at the end of Gravesend is actually something of “a warning—a prophecy of society’s potential to alienate itself from itself.” He suggests that these surreal scenes threaten to become indistinguishable from everyday life, our cities and streets stripped down to the civic minimum, used as nothing more than bleak stomping grounds for futuristic security forces armed with military-grade tools.

“We have estates, parks, nightclubs, tube stations,” Clarke writes, “but is the community missing from Gravesend significantly more present in our inhabited cities and towns?” His own answer remains unspoken but obvious.

It is, he wrote, “a city standing on the planet for one purpose: to be rioted, hijacked, trashed, held hostage, sacked, and overrun by thousands of chaotic scenarios, only so that it can be reclaimed, retaken, re-propped in circuitous loops of more dazzling proto-militant exercise, stormed by a thousand coordinated boots for eternity, targeted by hundreds of synchronized crosshairs of both lethal and non-lethal weapons.”

4 thoughts on “The Civic Minimum”

Apropos of nothing, Gravesend appears in the novel "The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell, which just came out. This novel would appeal to the readers of Bldgblog, I think. (No affiliation w/ the author or any booksellers.)

Weird and fascinating spot indeed. It talks much and loud about our present and future.As a byproduct of the construction bubble/financial crisis in Spain have appeared empty urban places (as for instance Valdeluz, a brand new city 80 km far from Madrid, planned for 30000 people and inhabited by barely 2000 now), that could be in the future scenarios of this kind, because they were born dead and nobody knows what to do with them. Who knows.